Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glen Burger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glen Burger Nicole Sidhu glen burger, Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 272. isbn: 978–0–8122–4960–6. $65. The study of wifely virtue, its role in the home and in the broader sociopolitical imaginary, is a standby of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. Medievalists pay far less attention to the 'good wife,' in part because medieval gender politics has seemed to many to be rooted in a misogynist disgust for female reproduction that allowed only nuns and virgin maidens to attain exemplary female virtue. Medievalists have also long been aware that their period sees significant transformations in notions of marriage—most notably the emergence of affection, mutual companionship, and sexual fulfillment as marital ideals that came to equal the traditional values of economic and familial alliance. And yet, while historians have examined the economics that undergirded this new vision of marriage, the deeper cultural transformations that enabled and nurtured it have thus far remained a mystery. Enter Glenn Burger, with a pioneering and intellectually ambitious new study that seeks to fill these gaps in our intellectual and cultural history. Burger's subject is conduct literature for women, but rather than analyzing it as a prescription for gendered norms of behavior, he characterizes conduct literature as part of a broader cultural movement that changed gender relations. Becoming Conduct provides a timely revision to medieval conduct studies (a field just now reaching conceptual middle age and due for a reboot) by redefining conduct literature. Instead of examining the traditional manuals of behavior that have thus far been the field's focus, Burger expands the definition of 'conduct' to include a much broader swath of texts aimed at instructing women. For Burger, conduct literature is not just about formulating normative modes of gender behavior but is part of larger social and cultural transformation that sees ideals of virtue, and the cultural authority associated with them, expanding from the clergy to the laity. Integral to this movement is an emerging notion of ethical subject-hood for both lay men and women that is constructed out of their marital roles as a 'good husband' and 'good wife.' Examining a range of texts focused on women's conduct, Burger notes the emergence of a focus on ideals relating to women as wives, rather than aristocratic lovers (according to the tradition of fin amors) or female religious (the focus of instructional texts like Ancrene Wisse). Fueled by a new emphasis on marriage as a sacrament by Church authorities, conduct manuals of the 'long fourteenth century' present a new ideal that foregrounds a wife's virtuous conduct and its ability to alter marital and social relations. By rooting their ideals in married virtue, these texts [End Page 115] diverge from earlier medieval traditions in allowing the good wife to, for the first time, equal the virgin nun in her potential as an ethical subject. The emerging ideal of 'the good wife,' Burger proposes, has far-reaching consequences, including a concomitant new ideal of 'the good husband' for men and a new model of social relations that makes household relations a fitting metaphor for relations of ruler to the ruled. Chapter One examines the Journées Chrétiennes—works that provided guidelines to spiritually ambitious secular women on how to emulate the devotional discipline of monks and nuns. These texts adjusted monastic practice to the busy life in the home to allow the wife to claim spiritual virtue within the confines of married life. In doing so, they positioned the wife as a subject with ethical potential. Chapter Two turns to texts more commonly recognized as conduct literature. Focused on the behavior of women in the secular world, these works include Louis IX's Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle, Durand de Champagne's Speculum dominarum, and the Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry. Here, Burger considers how the texts move away from the idea of woman as irretrievably fallen or wayward (common in clerical writings on women) to imagine woman's nature as...